Present invention embodiments relate to a program development environment for distributed computing systems, and more specifically, to a development life cycle that comprises testing a program on a distributed server from within an integrated development environment (IDE).
Program development generally comprises multiple steps that are performed multiple times until a program is finalized. Developers write code in a programming language, execute the program to process one or more input data sets, compare the output of the program to expected output, make changes to the program, and eventually debug the program line by line, until the output of the program matches the expected output.
Typically, developers use an integrated development environment (IDE) (e.g., Eclipse, NETBEANS®, VISUAL STUDIO®, etc.) to write and run programs on local computing systems. Some tools allow programs to be run in a server environment. For example, the Eclipse web tools platform (WTP) provides the capability to register a web server in the Eclipse environment and to dynamically deploy and run web applications on the web server directly from Eclipse. However, existing tools do not run programs in a distributed server environment, retrieve results, and compare the results against expected output.